from Shift Mag :

I spent the day at ideaCity today, Moses Znaimer's three-day "famous smart people" conference and it blew my mind. But it wasn't all brain-crunch. Here's a taste of the lighter side:

Marc Garneau, Canada's first astronaut, trying to describe what it feels like to be strapped into your chair for three hours before takeoff (about two and a half hours in, you'll probably really want to go to the bathroom).

Josef Penninger, geneticist, joking about how he ended up doing gene experiments on mice: When he was young, he was terrified of them. "As I was walking down the street, I would always look over my shoulder because there could be a mouse following me."

And Doug Perovic, the chair of the University of Toronto's Nanoengineering Program, bringing a lighter to a thin metal wire nanoengineered to react in a very specific way to heat, and watching it curl itself up into a little maple leaf.
posted by [d] at 20:59